07 - Skinner's Ghosts

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘This is Skinner, in Scotland,’ he said, curtly, to the man who answered his call with a simple ‘Yes?’. ‘The technical people are analysing a tape for me. Have them call me back with a progress report, within ten minutes.’

  Six minutes and four seconds later, the direct line rang. He picked it up quickly, laying down the file he was reading. ‘Skinner.’

  The voice on the other end of the line answered in a middle-American drawl. Skinner knew that the special relationship which had sprung up between the new Prime Minister and the US President had led to promises of greater co-operation between the security services for which each was responsible. He wondered if the caller was early evidence of their sincerity.

  ‘Good morning, sir,’ said the woman. ‘My name is Caroline Farmer. I’ve been working on your tape.’

  ‘Good to hear from you, Ms Farmer. Been with us long?’

  ‘Three weeks, sir, on secondment from Langley.’ The Scot smiled, his supposition answered. ‘What’s your background? ’ he asked.

  ‘I’m a graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, been with the Company for four years. I’m over on the new information exchange programme.’

  ‘That’s good. How about my mystery voice, then? You got anything for me?’

  Caroline Farmer hesitated. ‘Yeah, we’ve got something,’ she began. ‘I’ll start with the accent. We have people here who reckon they can place the origin of UK citizens by the nature of their speech.’

  ‘Yes, I know. What are they saying?’

  ‘They believe that your caller is Scottish, sir.’

  ‘Hah,’ laughed Skinner, ‘that’s very good. Now carry on please: Scotland’s quite a big place.’

  ‘That’s it, sir,’ said the American. ‘They can’t do any better than that. They say that the basic cast of the voice indicates that the caller is Scottish. But his speech is absolutely flat, other than that. Listening to you, sir, I can detect a pronounced accent which I assume is regional Edinburgh.’

  ‘Mostly Lanarkshire, actually,’ the DCC grunted.

  ‘Okay, but distinctive none the less. This guy is either disguising his voice, or he’s been subject to so many influences that he cannot be pinned down. They did say, though, that he could have spent some time outside Scotland, or have a non-Scottish parent.’

  ‘That’s something at least. Now how about the tape itself: any joy from that?’

  Caroline Farmer paused once more. ‘I’m not sure whether you’ll find it joyful, sir.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘but first I have to ask you something? When the call came in, was there an open door or window in your home.’

  Skinner frowned, searching his memory. ‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘It was a warm night. We had the window open a little.’

  ‘Good. Now think again. Can you remember, as you listened to the man, whether you could hear anything else?’

  He closed his eyes, and tried to place himself back in the bedroom. His anger still burning over Salmon’s taunting call. Undressing in the dark, beginning the process of unwinding, of relaxing, of making love. Then the ringing of the phone, and his fury erupting once more. He stopped and concentrated on the moments before the interruption. Pamela, kissing, licking, nibbling her way down his body . . .

  ‘Geese!’ he said suddenly. ‘Through the window I could hear geese. It’s no big deal for us, part of the sound furniture, you might say. There’s a wildlife sanctuary near my house. In summer, they go over in flocks at all hours.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Caroline Farmer. ‘That was on the tape: the sound of geese. You couldn’t hear it on the cassette we sent up, but when we built it up, it was there.

  ‘Now to the interesting part. The equipment that we use to tape telephone calls records each half of the conversation on separate tracks. This is the sound we took from the background of your track. Listen.’

  She broke off, and suddenly Skinner heard in the earpiece the familiar squawking sound of a large flight of wild geese, as he had heard it thousands of times, as he had heard it less than forty-eight hours before. There was a click as the player was switched off.

  ‘Now,’ the woman resumed. ‘Hold on while I switch cassettes. Okay, ready. This is the background from the caller’s track.’

  Another pause. Another click. Once more the sound of flying geese filled Skinner’s ear. He listened, puzzled, for a few seconds. ‘Wrong tape,’ he said, at last. ‘You’re playing my track again.’

  No sir,’ said Farmer, emphatically. ‘I am not. That is the background from the caller’s track.’

  ‘Well, surely the sound from my phone must have fed through to his.’

  ‘It did. There was feedback sound on both tracks. We’ve stripped that off. You, and this guy, sir, you could both hear the same flight of geese, at the same volume, at the same time. Which means that the call was made from very near your home.’

  Skinner sat at his desk, stunned. ‘There’s no possibility of the equipment being faulty?’

  ‘No, sir, there is not. You live in a village, I understand.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘That might make it easier for you. We were able to match the sounds on each track exactly. The recording levels on each were almost exactly the same. I would say that you and your caller were no more than a quarter of a mile apart.

  ‘Can I ask you, sir, in which direction do the geese fly?’

  ‘Westward; by evening and night, they fly westward.’

  ‘Good, that tells me from the sound pattern that the caller was to the east of your home.’

  ‘Anything else?’ asked Skinner, eagerly. ‘Was there anything else on his track? Can you tell what type of telephone it was?’

  The American chuckled on the other end of the secure line. ‘We ain’t that good, sir. It was a touchtone telephone, and the caller disabled your 1471 tracing service, but you knew that already. There were other sounds though, faintly, beneath the geese. An automobile passed close by during the call travelling in a straight line at about forty miles per hour. And there was music playing nearby. Further away, there was the sound of a woman, shouting angrily. Does any of that help?’

  Skinner grunted. ‘It might. Listen, Agent, or whatever I should call you, that’s great work. I want copies of all these tapes sent up here for my people as soon as possible, like today. Can you isolate that woman’s voice?’

  ‘Sure. I’ll put that on a separate tape. I’ll have everything with you by courier by mid-afternoon. Meantime, we’ll keep on working. We can take resolution up practically to the level of an individual goose. You never know what else we might turn up.’

  24

  Detective Chief Superintendent Martin was seated at his desk as Skinner rapped on his door and burst into the room. Detective Constable Sammy Pye, with his back to the door, looked over his shoulder and sprang to his feet.

  ‘I’m just getting young Sammy started on that list you ordered, sir,’ said the Head of CID.

  ‘Good,’ said Skinner, closing the door behind him, and waving Pye back to his seat, ‘but put it on hold for now. Our Friends in the South have come up trumps. We know where the caller was when he phoned me, and you’re not going to believe it. The cheeky bastard was within a quarter of a mile of my bloody house!’

  Martin’s eyebrows rose. ‘You what?’ he gasped, incredulously.

  ‘That’s right. The background noise gave him away. From what I’ve been told, my guess is that he called from the phone box outside the Post Office, across the road from the pub. However we can’t be certain of that. Chief Superintendent, I want to know, from British Telecom, the location of every telephone in Gullane that was used at ten fifty last Saturday night, and I want every one of those subscribers checked out.’

  He paused. ‘I can’t believe that the guy would actually hide Mark in my home village, but it’s the first lead we’ve had and it must be followed. Unless we turn up something from the telephone check, I want a house-by-hou
se check of the whole place. You can leave mine out, but I want every other door in that village knocked.’

  ‘What are we looking for?’

  ‘We’re looking for a lucky break, Andy.’

  The Head of CID grunted assent. ‘Yes, like the guy still being around. It beggars belief, though, to think that he actually lives there.’

  ‘Sure, I agree. But he phoned from there. It’s not beyond belief that he might be hiding out there. Remember, there are still weekend cottages and holiday homes in Gullane . . . my own among them, till recently at any rate.’

  ‘Do we know which they are?’

  ‘A few, through Neighbourhood Watch, but not all, not by any means. Quite a few are just left from one visit to the next. Some have private caretaking arrangements.’

  ‘How do you want to play it? What line should our officers take with the householders when they knock their doors? These people are your neighbours, after all.’

  Skinner pondered the question for a while. ‘Simple is best,’ he said. ‘Let’s have them say that we’re extending our enquiries out from Edinburgh. Ask each occupier if he’s seen anything out of the ordinary in the area, and ask those with substantial outbuildings - and there are some; you’ve seen them, up the Hill - whether they’ve checked them lately.

  ‘Where a house is unoccupied, see if the neighbours know anything about the owner.’

  Martin nodded. ‘Let’s think carefully about all this,’ he said. ‘We’ve got an advantage, here. Our man can’t know that we’re on to the fact that he called from Gullane. We want to keep that information secret for as long as we can.’

  ‘Fine. In that case let’s keep it literally to ourselves. Other than you, me, and our staffs, the people doing the rounds can simply be told what we’ve just decided to tell the punters; that the search is being widened. They’ll be all the more convincing if they don’t know any different themselves.

  ‘You’ll need more leg-power for all this, so you’d better mobilise Brian Mackie and Maggie Rose. All of a sudden this investigation has spilled over into their area.’ Skinner nodded to himself, as if in satisfaction. ‘How quickly can you get it done?’

  ‘It’ll be done within forty-eight hours.’

  ‘Quicker, if you can. Start today. While that’s happening, there’s something else we should do. I want officers in all five pubs and hotel bars in Gullane this evening, checking on everyone who was out for a bevvy on Saturday.

  ‘Someone may have seen our man in the phone box, and may be able to give us a description.’ He paused. ‘We’ll need a cover story for that too. Tell our troops that we’re looking for someone who’s been using the box to make obscene phone calls. Christ,’ he added grimly, ‘that’s true, in a way.’

  Skinner turned to leave. ‘There’ll be another line of investigation to be followed up also,’ he said, ‘but I can’t do anything about that until a certain tape arrives from London.’

  He opened the door, then stopped, and spun round to face Martin and Pye again. ‘Call box. Coins. Sammy, get on to Telecom and have them empty the cash from that phone box. You never know, maybe my caller left a thumbprint on a ten-pence piece that’ll help us put a name to his voice.’

  25

  Pamela frowned at him across the kitchen, as she ladled soup into two shallow white bowls. ‘Is this how it’s going to be? You nipping home at lunchtime to check up on me?’ She handed him a bowl and a plate of thick-cut sandwiches, and gestured him towards the door.

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ he protested, carrying his snack though to the big living area of her top-floor flat, and sitting on the couch which faced the big W-shaped window, draped with white muslin now, where once it had offered an uninterrupted view of the Water of Leith as it coursed towards the sea.

  ‘I’m here because I want to be. On top of that, I had that news for you about the phone call.’

  Unsmiling, Pam set about her lunch. ‘Look,’ she said, finally, ‘how much longer do I have to stay here? I feel like a hostage. If I’m supposed to be on leave, can’t I at least go out?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Skinner, ‘if you take your escorts with you.’

  ‘Oh really! This man won’t come after me.’

  In shirtsleeves, he shrugged his shoulders. ‘If there’s only one chance in a hundred of that,’ he said, ‘I’m still not going to take it. Whoever this guy is he certainly identifies with me. Maybe it’s purely because I’m a high-profile police figure that he can thumb his nose at, but my publicised connection with wee Mark McGrath makes that unlikely.

  ‘Against that background, in the light of the Spotlight story, you have to be protected.’

  She looked at him, as he devoured his last sandwich. ‘Should I really be scared, then?’ she asked, quietly, when he was finished.

  ‘Not while you’re here, with protection outside. Not while I’m here. Women and kids are this man’s size.’

  She looked at him again, sulkily. ‘But couldn’t you protect me in the office? After all, I’m sure this leave I’m taking will come off my annual allowance . . . don’t try and tell me different. I can see the Spotlight headline now: “Skinner’s girlfriend gets extra holidays!” ’

  ‘It’s because of Spotlight that we . . . okay, I . . . thought you’d be better away from the office for a few days.’

  ‘What!’ She sat bolt upright, sulking seriously now. ‘I thought this was all about security. But you mean you and Andy decided I’d be better kept out of the way for a while to save embarrassment. Whose, in that case? Mine, or yours?’

  His eyebrows came together in a single heavy line. ‘I’m still there, remember,’ he growled.

  ‘Oh, so you are embarrassed!’

  ‘No, I didn’t say that. It’s you that I’m concerned about.’

  Her expression softened. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I suppose you are. But, please, don’t make decisions about me without involving me. Even if you are my commanding officer.’ She hesitated. ‘Let me come back, please. If people point fingers at me it’ll be behind my back, and I can take that, I think. Let’s do what we’ve done up to now, travel to and from work separately, and steer clear of each other in the off ice.’

  She slid across beside him on the couch, and poked him in the ribs. ‘Come on, I’ll bet you need me, too. Don’t tell me that the Head of CID isn’t short-handed just now. It isn’t right to keep me here, when I could be out helping you catch the man who murdered Mrs McGrath and stole her son.’

  He laid his plate and bowl on the floor, and turned towards her, his hands gripping her upper arms, gently. ‘Okay,’ he said, smiling. ‘I give up. You can come in tomorrow. But either we go in together or you get a lift from the protection people. Deal?’

  ‘Deal.’ She nodded, and slipping free of his grasp, threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. ‘Now,’ she whispered, ‘since this is a one-off occasion, what say we take full advantage of it?’

  He disengaged himself, still grinning. ‘One triumph per lunch hour’s enough for you,’ he said. ‘I have to get back to the office. There’s a hot tape coming up from London. Meantime, you can spend the afternoon deciding whether you intend to sue the Spotlight for defaming your impeccable character.’

  26

  Sammy Pye was waiting in the Command Corridor as Skinner bounded up the stairs from the small entrance hallway. The DCC knew at once that, whatever news he had brought, he would not be starting his afternoon with a smile.

  ‘What’s the damage?’ he asked the glum young detective.

  ‘It’s that phone box, sir,’ said Pye, heavily. ‘The cash compartment was emptied at half past nine this morning. By the time I spoke to Telecom the money was back at their regional office, mixed up with the takings from about thirty other kiosks.

  ‘I’ve told them not to bank it till they hear from us.’

  Skinner shook his head. ‘Sam, with that number of boxes, even if we had enough technicians to dust all those coins, we’d be cross-matching prints from now till Chr
istmas. You tell Telecom they can bank their cash. Let them concentrate on giving us that list of numbers in use last Saturday night, at eleven.’

  The young man’s earnest face brightened. ‘I’ve got that already, sir. There were six phones used in Gullane at that time, as well as the call box.’ He caught Skinner’s expression and nodded. ‘Yes, sir, BT confirmed that it was used at the time in question.

  ‘Mr Martin told me to give the list to Superintendent Mackie,’ he went on, quickly, ‘for him to check it out.’

  ‘That’s good. Thanks, Sammy.’

  The young man nodded and made to leave, but hesitated. ‘Yes?’ said Skinner. ‘Something bothering you?’

  The constable took a deep breath. ‘Well, sir, couldn’t we just check the subscribers and see who they are? I mean most of the folk in Gullane are . . .’ He stopped, sensing a chasm before him.

  Skinner smiled. ‘Are old bufties, you were going to say? Like me, you mean?’

  ‘Well, eh . . .’

  ‘You’re right, of course. I’ll probably know most of them. No, Sam, the main reason for checking every call is to prove beyond doubt that it was the phone box that was used.’

  Pye nodded, and headed off, back to the CID suite to pass his message to BT. Skinner stepped into his secretary’s office. ‘Any deliveries?’ he asked.

  Ruth nodded and picked up a tape cassette box from her desk, waving it in the air. ‘Ten minutes ago,’ she said.

  ‘Excellent,’ said the DCC. ‘Let’s hear it. Full blast.’

  On her side table, his secretary kept a radio cassette player, which was used mainly for monitoring radio news bulletins. She took the tape from its box, inserted it in the slot and pressed ‘play’, twisting the volume control to a high setting.

  At first they heard only hissing, but after thirty seconds or so, the sound changed. There was no background noise at all, only a woman’s voice, shouting but slurring, her words insistent, but thick, as if with alcohol. ‘Lemme go, lemme go,’ she called out.